Thursday, 7 January 2016

Businesses today are challenged to handle more and more data than ever before. Regulation, customer expectation and business growth are just a few of the drivers behind this trend. With companies making larger and larger investments in data storage, the question then becomes, 'At what point does it make sense to seek the services of a data storage provider?'

To seek this answer today's CIOs must first answer a number of key questions: At what rate are my data capacity needs likely to grow over the next five years? What investments would I need to make in human resources to support the investments in storage infrastructure? Are the costs of this infrastructure becoming disproportionate to capex costs related to the core business?

Data hosting providersenable companies lease dedicated servers to store their data and proactively provide support and maintenance of the equipment in line with agreed service level agreements and guarantees. Some data hosting providers also offer server uptime monitoring, OS patching, operating system restores, security monitoring, and more. Typically, Data hosting providers offer a much higher uptime than can be offered in-house.

Gartner, Forrester among others have confirmed through research, that companies can considerably lower the total cost of infrastructure ownership by up to 60 percent while improving efficiency through managed services. With the right data hosting partner, companies can focus on their core business and not have to metamorphose into full-fledged IT companies. In addition, data service providers more readily have access to IT best practices which companies get to leverage through partnership.

This being said, not only must a data hosting provider have robust infrastructure; well trained personnel; be reputable; able to provide complementary services; the provider must offer a level of security backed by service level agreements and guarantees that will inspire the confidence for their customers to actually let go.